Ohne Titel / Spring 2013 RTW

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Ohne Titel never strays too far from the contours of the female form where silhouette is concerned, and creating curvilinear second-skin knits comes as second nature to them. Given their natural affinity with the art world, it’s hardly surprising that designers Alexa Adams and Flora Gill looked to seventies Chicago imagist Karl Wirsum to reconfigure their body-conscious parameters this season. “He had such a cartoonish take on body shapes, which was really interesting for us to play with,” said Gill before their runway show today. With his exaggerated renderings of women, the artist’s X-ray vision renderings of women are anything but anatomically correct, and that polymorphous vision worked in Ohne Titel’s favor. Wirsum-inspired brushstrokes offered a new roadmap on the proportions of billowing tees and jacquard minis; cheeky trompe l’oeil motifs in persimmon and turquoise alluded to the curves that lie beneath. Even the stripes on a drop-waisted mint green pleated dress, where lines ran diagonally across the chest, offered a subtle tongue-in-cheek commentary on the body.

That gentle sense of volume has been easing its way through several of the collections we’ve seen this week, and continued on Ohne Titel’s runway with bombers and striped drawstring pants that were finished with a winning chunky Masai-warrior-like rubber soled shoe. The duo tend to find their footing on athletic ground, and overall the collection played to those strengths. It would, however, have been nice to see that aesthetic pushed further into newer, uncharted territory.